‘My People’: controversial text turns 100

Leading English Literature academic Katie Gramich plays her
part in the centenary of the major work of the writer once called the most
hated man in Wales.

A century ago, Caradoc Evans’ My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West
Wales shook Wales to its core, demonising rural Welsh-speaking Wales.

Professor Gramich explains: “The book was a volume of
short stories. Evans, whose first language was Welsh, had managed to ‘escape’
from the poverty of his background to reinvent himself as a Fleet Street
journalist and, now, for the first time, an experimental fiction writer.

“The stories of My
People caused a furore because they presented rural Wales not as an idyllic
‘land of the white gloves’ but as a dystopian hell on earth where the dirt-poor
peasants were tyrannized over by unscrupulous and hypocritical chapel
ministers. Evans drew on his intimate knowledge of Welsh and of the Bible to
create an unforgettable idiolect for his characters, which many Welsh people of
the time and for years afterwards, saw as an insult to their language and
culture. To cap it all, Evans published the book in English and in London, so
that the old enemy could laugh at the satire of the Welsh by one of their own!”

David ‘Caradoc’ Evans was born in 1878 in the village of
Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, Carmarthenshire and raised in Rhydlewis, Ceredigion.
Leaving school aged 14, he moved first to Barry, Cardiff and then London. After
attending evening classes to improve his English, he turned his hand to
journalism and landed a job as a reporter on Fleet Street. In 1915, he
published his first work, ‘My People’.

In 1931, Dylan Thomas
visited Aberystwyth to pay homage to the author. Subsequently, Thomas and
his inter-war ‘golden generation’ of Anglo-Welsh writers were to be dubbed
‘sons of Caradoc.’

Professor Gramich continues: ‘It’s
time we looked again at this amazing book in order to see it for what it is: a
daring, inventive, modernist experiment which deserves to stand alongside James
Joyce’s Dubliners as a work which
helped to drag Welsh writing not into the gutter but into the modern world.”

In this year marking the centenary of
his polarising collection of short stories, Professor Gramich has contributed
to television and radio programmes on the figure that inspired a golden
generation of Anglo-Welsh writers in the twentieth century.